Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Introduces students to plays and performance works created and adapted for the stage, and/or the performative dimensions of other literary forms. May be organized historically, generically or thematically. The course may also explore the links between literary and performance theory. Includes attention to writing skills. Students with credit for ENGL 103W may not take this course for further credit. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Place and Displacement: Stage Plays about Refugees, Exiles, and Homelands

A Hindu dancer tries to get past three very different immigration desks. An Indigenous Hawai’ian steals bones from a museum in Germany to return them to Hawai’i. A Jewish milkman with five daughters tries to adapt to a changing world in the Russian Pale of Settlement. A Black woman working in England wants to return to apartheid South Africa. A First Nations man thinks through his relationship to his culture and a set of petroglyphs in what is now Ontario. A group of immigrants finds love in Québec City.

This course uses the artistic performance of people’s relationship with the places they come from and/or the places they arrive at to examine our assumptions about belonging and culture. We will study a number of stage plays in script form (available online or legally excerpted from larger collections) written by authors from varied cultural contexts. Most of the works are by OwnVoices playwrights, and some are more complicated.

This is a writing-intensive course, allowing us space to practice writing in academic and creative forms, and at least half the grade is based on writing for which students receive feedback. There are two major writing assignments developed and revised over the semester: 1) an argumentative essay using one primary text (a play script) and other academic secondary sources (articles/book chapters) as evidence, and 2) a short original one-act play about place and/or displacement. Each tutorial group will choose one student’s original script to be part of a public reading event at the end of term to raise money for an organization that supports refugees. Any student may submit their finished play for the English Department’s Betty Lambert Prize and their finished essay for the Library’s Student Writing Contest.

 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Skills developed: This course will help you learn to
1) interpret stories for performance, gathering and evaluating textual evidence,
2) write persuasive arguments supported by evidence,
3) think about cultural belonging and write creatively about it,
4) revise and improve your writing, and
5) give peer feedback in clear, concise, helpful ways.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

No texts to purchase: texts will be either available from SFU library, online, or as legal excerpts from anthologies.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: